Thursday, 27 January 2011

Hello!

You might be wondering where I've been. Well, so am I.

Last time I wrote on these pages I had just handed in my thesis, and in doing so, completed my masters. It turns out that I did rather well, and ended up passing with distinction, which was a wonderful surprise. My former supervisor and I are looking to submit our results to a journal for publication, and I shall keep you posted on our progress. It will be my first publication, and so the whole process of submission, peer review and revision is as alien to me as it probably is to you.

Next up is the PhD application process, which will of course be hugely fun. I have already applied for a couple, and already had one rejection. I am not too disheartened, though, because the one that rejected me was, for neuroscience, the cream of the crop, and massively competitive. When I, eventually, get accepted onto a programme, I will be sure to chronicle my experiences here, hopefully a little better than I did on my masters.

I shall leave you with a little reading material, that hopefully you will find enthralling. The royal society recently published a series of articles on neuroscience, with topics ranging from the technical methods by which neuroimaging works, to some of the ethical quandaries of studying brain function. The whole selection can be found here.

One article that I found particularly accessible for a non-scientific audience was 'The scope and limits of neuroimaging' by Professor Geraint Rees (director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, where I researched my thesis). It gives a great introduction to some of the key themes of my masters course, namely the various different methods used to image the brain, their strengths and their weaknesses. The article can be found here.